It is scary, isn’t it? And yet it is very likely. If we look back on history, we see vast amounts of injustice, and we see even the best men complicit in it and unaware of it being injustice. It stands to reason that the future will look back at us in the same way.
On the positive side, though, they will probably recognise our ignorance and will not judge us too harshly! When I read Erich Fromm’s amazingly good book on love, The Art of Loving, and I come to the passages where he writes that homosexuality is a psychological disorder … well, I remind myself that the book was written in the 50s, and that no writer from that period should be judged too harshly for holding such a view.
Even if Christie happened to have been a racist in her personal life (and I’m not saying she was or wasn’t), that wouldn’t change how the nursery rhyme in the book is innocuous in every respect except for the N-word. The verses themselves, about visiting the zoo and chopping wood and getting into Chancery, etc., have no racial undertones, and someone reading the “Indian” or “soldier” versions would have no idea about the rhyme’s origin without doing background research. It’s the N-word alone that carries racial baggage, not for how it’s being used by Christie, but simply because it always carries baggage. It was an inconsiderate title, which is why it was changed upon publication in the U.S. But when you look at the book by itself, its narrative doesn’t have racist intentions. The same thing can’t be said for Tom and Jerry, which is a good counter-example.
CMG, I guess I’ve been misunderstanding your point, and I apologize. I agree that what makes it racist is the word in question (although I think the “Indian” version is still kind of racist against Indians, even if “Indian” isn’t a slur, because of the way it infantilizes them), and that the book itself doesn’t seem to have racist intentions absent the rhyme. (At least, I don’t think so; it’s been a long time since I read it.) I misinterpreted what you said about an innocent context. Sorry for that.
No need to apologize! As I said earlier, I think conversations like this are a positive thing! We certainly can’t read each other’s minds, so it’s always good to have a discussion.
So… having watched Tom & Jerry as a kid and being curious as to what all this ‘racism’ was, I Googled it to see. It turns out that there’s a black cleaner in the program called Mammy Two Shoes.
That’s it. That’s the entire racism element.
Apparently having a cleaner of colour is considered a racist thing. (Or did I miss the bit where Tom joins the KKK and Jerry starts talking in jive?) Honestly, with this kind of OTT stuff going on, it’s a wonder there’s anything in the world that isn’t considered racist.
While writing a reply agreeing to the above, I suddenly thought of a sensitive point that I think may be closer to the heart of it.
Imagine you’re a black child, about seven or eight years old, and as you’re watching T&J - because you happen to love T&J instead of running over whores in GTA, bless you - you’re continually subjected to a depiction of black people that tells you you talk funny, you are to be mocked, your role in life is to serve.
Once this image lodged itself in my mind, I understood a lot more. The preface is probably not a bad idea. It’s not that it’s racist (well, tricky ground, it certainly wasn’t meant to be racist, but viewed in the sense that it’s a derogatory view of an ethneticity it certainly is racist, but then again things like this are allowed in humour, and then again innocent intent doesn’t mean it’s innocent by today’s standards… it’s tricky!) - it’s the message that it sends to black children, who will not necessarily know that all this stereotyping is in the past.
Parental guidance is probably better than the preface, who children are unlikely to pay any attention to, but still.
The thing is, if you apply that kind of thinking, you could see racist connotations in everything.
Lord of the Rings? Definitely racist. The bad guy is referred to as the Dark Lord of Mordor, after all.
Harry Potter? Also racist. Lord Voldemort is a practitioner of black magic.
Postman Pat? Racist! Pat’s not a black guy so clearly the show’s writers are a bunch of white racists! (Then again, his cat is black and white so that might score them a few points.)
This is all getting very silly. Is there anything in the world that isn’t racist if you try hard enough?
I agree, but in this case it’s not quite as convoluted as that. It’s not just a bad guy who’s referred to as being dark; it’s not black magic; it’s not all of that. It’s simpy a lot more powerful: children looking at a show where the one black human (though to be fair the show’s never about the humans at all) is there to be mocked, and who speaks funny, and who acts funny. Compound it on all the other shows - like Marx Brothers films, whose antics are also appealing to children and who also present a stereotypical view of black people, though more damning in some films than others - and you have something that is very interesting from an adult perspective but potentially very damaging to a child.
Possibly we’re still far too close to the days when those stereotypes were accepted as fact. Maybe in fifty more years it won’t matter any more. Right now, though, I’m forced to agree that if I had a black child (I’m not black but who knows where my heart will take me) I would not like him/her to have an early exposition of people just like him/her constantly being made fun of. That sort of shit sticks with you.
It’s not racism, per se; I definitely wouldn’t call it racism. But I would call it sensitive.
As a British person you may not be aware of the Mammy stereotype, which goes back to slavery and minstrel shows and appears in D.W. Griffith’s pro-KKK Birth of a Nation, (as you’d expect of something with that background) it is racist in a way that having a black housekeeper character would not necessarily be. (Please don’t take offense at my reference to your nationality; it’s just that I don’t think that it’s reasonably to expect you to be as familiar with stereotypes prevalent in American culture, the way I might not be familiar with stereotypes of a Yorkshire or Manchester).
Aside from not understanding how the cartoon’s depiction of a black maid was problematic (enough so that half a century ago, MGM redrew and revoiced the cartoon’s depiction of a black woman to make her a white woman), you also missed the blackface.
Am I wrong in thinking that this thread has now gone really far afield? Funny about that…
No one seemed interested in the original topic, and this new direction has been fruitful. As the OP I’m not worried.
Also, the whole point of this thread was that a discussion was pre-emptively shot down. The fact that this discussion is going so constructively quite satisfies me. We are civil enough to speak about these things, it seems.
Part of the point many people try to make is that indeed, racism provides a bias in a lot of white society, both conscious and unconscious. It is wrong to say that things aren’t racist up until the moment actual slurs are used.
Please, just stop and think for a second. You really don’t see how there might be a bit of colonialist attitudes in that story? A fantasy where the brave and noble white peoples of Middle Earth (corresponding to north Europeans) fight against the hordes of faceless dark-skinned “Haradrim” who live in the south and follow Sauron? I’m not arguing Tolkien was a bad person, I’m not saying he set out to make a statement about the people of Asia and Africa. I’m saying in the course of telling his epic story of a fantasy world, some of that slipped in.
If I think hard enough I can also come up with enough comparisons to make everything racist. Isn’t it better, and more accurate, to say that the factors of real life will inevitably intrude upon any piece of good fiction? The elements that make up an epic are the same elements that make up real life. You can draw comparisons with most everything, and if you’re a scholar, you’ll delight in doing so. But to make a more definitive, more direct connection? That’s probably not worth it. For one thing, “Haradrim” sounds quite Islamic, so why shouldn’t it instead be a tale about the crusaders fighting against the then-perceived heathens?
Thing is, this sort of thing happens all over history. Of course it’ll also be in stories. You can, if you want to, cherry-pick an event in history to correspond with the story… but it’s usually not worth it.
You wouldn’t just have to be a black child to be influenced by stereotypes like this. It takes more than one demographic to perpetuate a stereotype, after all. You just hope that children will have parents that can explain things to them, which unfortunately isn’t always the case.
Regarding Lord of the Rings, that’s a whole new can of worms. I’ve heard people call it racist and I’ve also heard people defend it pretty convincingly. But saying that colonial attitudes have slipped into the book sounds like a fair way to put it. I do think the Haradrim are more complex than dark-skinned faceless hordes, though.
I don’t know what this means. Are conclusions that scholars draw less valid? Should people not draw comparisons if they are not scholars?
By “then-perceived,” do you mean the way a British author saw the Crusades from the 1950s? That’s part of the discussion. The way that tale is framed, the way you depict one side as good guys, and one side as bad guys. Or the way that imagery of crusaders is invoked, despite the fact that the book details a just war of self-defense against invaders, led by noble selfless kings without political goals. Not many historians would characterize the actual Crusades that way. Discussing how those two things get conflated, and why in particular it was done that way by that author in that time is worth analyzing. Yes, “the factors of real life intrude upon fiction,” as you say. Part of that is racism, sexism, and what ever else cultural baggage we all bring to artistic expression. But the end goal of analysis is not just to declare that “everything is racist,” as though that dismisses a work. It doesn’t. It’s to look at exactly how and why it ended up that way so we can better understand art, and through that, ourselves.
I really would have thought people reading that realised I was using a ridiculously silly example as an example oh how ridiculous and silly debates like this can become. Try hard enough and you can find racist connotations in everything. Name any book, TV show or movie and I bet that someone somewhere can find a racist element to it.
I always think the problem is when people stop using common sense and start actively going out of their way to find things to complain about.
How so? I just meant that we’re not given a single named Harad character, friend or foe, to my knowledge. It mentions there are many Harad tribes, but they’re generally treated interchangeably. And I don’t remember anywhere in the book they’re anything but adversaries on the battlefield for the heroes to fight.
You were vehemently complaining about calling Tom and Jerry racist over its use of the Mammy stereotype, which is a racist stereotype with a history of more than a century. I don’t think you’re in a position to say that other people have stopped using common sense.
I think if a lot of people seem bitter at media portrayals of race or gender or sexuality or what have you, it’s because they often bring arguments, both academic and personally motivated, and are met with dismissive language and apathy. They’re told that there’s nothing wrong with the media itself, and that they just need to calm down and why can’t they enjoy it without analyzing it like the “rest of us.”
If you can apply sound analysis and conclude that most aspects of the larger culture exhibit racism or sexism, that is not a statement against the nature of analysis. It is a statement about the larger culture.